Near the end of Audlett Drive
you will find Barrow Hills Recreation Area, a place that has not seen much council investment in the last few decades. It has a rundown BMX Track featured in 2006 , an area for football, and a very uneven car park. The area is mostly used by dog walkers who can set out in the direction of Thrupp Lane.
One route passes through an area of very regular woodland with the exception of one bent tree,
then across a field with some larger trees to the south, and then skirts an Old Coal Yard (in Radley Parish) just before Thrupp Lane. I am guessing that this was the local coal distribution centre run by the coal board.
I read in the History of Ock Street that T Enoch & Son, of 75 Ock Street, was the last coal merchant in Abingdon. They closed in the 1990s having operated for about 100 years. In the 1970s there were three coal merchants in Abingdon. Go back to the 1960s and most families would have a coal storage area, and took a regular delivery of coal.
It’s unfortunate about the abandonment of the Barrow Hill Recreation Area – but I don’t expect this will discourage the council continuing to pour money into more swimming pools, running tracks, tennis courts, rollerblading parks and anything else they can think of for the sporting community.
I hope some day we will have someone on the council with an interest in the arts. The nearest thing we had to an arts centre closed many years ago and the Abingdon Arts festival was was starved of funding 3 years ago.
Ah George, didn’t you support, ney even recomend the giving of Tilsey Park sports complex to Abingdon School?shame on you !
No, sorry.
I have been writing my life story so was thrilled to find this. I used to play in Enoch’s yard with my brothers and Enoch’s kids. Many a time on going home my mother would shout at me for having coal shards ground into my knees and hands. I was not an elegant child lol
In all this talk of coal, does anyone recall a coal merchants by the name of William HUDSON in Abingdon?
Yes I sure do, he was my GT Grandad … 👍🏻